Philly media has completely turned on the self-promoting, excuse-making Cameroonian Coward
let's be clear — Nikola Jokic has his flaws as a basketball player, but there is no shot he would submit this type of performance in the biggest game of his team's season.
This performance is exactly what people have worried about with Embiid for so many years, supporters and critics alike. The missed shots are one thing, but he looked completely shaken and unprepared for this moment just days after saying out loud that this was a "fun" opportunity. It's easy to paint him as a frontrunner — a guy who is as good as good gets when things are rolling, but can't be counted on to pull the Sixers out of tough situations. There was no fight from him when they needed it, no extra effort on the glass or toughness befitting a star player who was in this moment.
Over the last two games of this series, Embiid had a chance to quiet all the doubts about his personal legacy up to this point. The criticism he has received — whether it has been in good faith or as part of useless MVP debates — will grow louder locally and nationally, and he can't blame anyone for that other than himself. This was simply not good enough for the best player on a team hoping to win a title.
It will take a long time for his reputation to recover from this game, but the bigger question will be if it ever does. We're deep enough into his career to ask whether this is simply where the road ends for a team led by Embiid. Short of supplying him with an ass-kicker as his co-star, which they had in Jimmy Butler back in 2019, the evidence is stacked against this guy as a title-winning leader.
Bonus:
That's part of what Harden doesn't get in these moments, why he has so often come up small in these moments — you simply cannot win a title by just exploiting rules and hoping that you get the right whistles for four straight rounds. He takes himself out of games and out of the playoffs by hoping he can run to an adult every time there's even a marginal rule break. Most of the time, you are going to have to deal with the problem yourself. He has cried wolf so many times that nobody wants to listen, and worse yet, he ruins his own flow and his team's flow on the floor by trying to win the rule-understanding competition before anything else.
